The expanded computing capabilities of a personal digital assistant and a cellular phone have resulted in the merger of personal communication and personal computing power. The merger of these two devices will be referred to herein as a computing cell phone. With these new devices there is a need for personal control over automated communications in order to take full advantage of the capabilities of the device.
For example, the computing cell phone, which can be quite mobile, might be continuously polled by commercial requesting computing systems seeking to obtain information from the user and to provide marketing information to the user. More particularly, a requesting computing system in a retail store might poll a computing cell phone carried by a user as the user enters the store or even passes by the store on the street. In effect anytime the user carrying such a computing cell phone enters the communication domain of a requesting computing system, the latter will likely try to open communications with the computing cell phone. The requesting computer system might be mobile itself, adding extra complexity.
Asking the user to interactively grant or deny each request is an inadequate solution, because the work load on the user would quickly become excessive, and because users commonly make mistakes that can lead to security or privacy violations. There is a need for the user to be able to delegate the responsibility of generating these responses to requests sent to the computing cell phone and further there is a need for the user to police these responses both as to nature of the response and use of the response. Further, there is a need for the user's computing cell phone to inform the requesting computing system of any temporary or persistent constraints on its use of information contained in the response. It is with respect to these considerations and others that the present invention has been made.